A Celebration of Ken's Writings (Part 3)

Meta-Genius: A Celebration of Ken’s Writings (Part 3) Reflections on His Work through Its Many Positive Critical Reviews This is the third and last installment of a celebration of Ken’s writings through a collection of some of the many incredibly positive review articles and blurbs that Ken’s work has garnished over the years. What started as a bit of a lark for us—it was just fun reading these reviews, especially the really early ones—but the exercise turned into more of a formal fete, a commemoration and thanks to Ken and all the integral pioneers who have worked so hard to advance Integral Studies as far as they have come, often under truly a vicious atmosphere toward anything integral. But persevere they did, often long enough to see ideas for which they were once vilified now have the preponderance of evidence supporting them and vindicating them. As only one example, there is enough widely respected research and data now available that the retro-Romantic ideal can finally be put to rest, that is, placed in its coffin with a genuine respect but a firm goodbye. Evidence now indicates that, among other things, a regressive U-turn does not occur in all, or even a majority, of people with spiritual awakenings; children do not have a closer tie to nature than adults (in fact, just the opposite, and by a huge margin; recent research shows that only 5% of children report “nature-centric” thinking—and that 5%, which is still narcissistic, occurs just as often in Copyright © 2007 KenWilber.com. All Rights Reserved. 1 children in urban cities as in the rain forest; and the other 95% exhibit flat-out anthropocentric and egocentric thinking). And now, the last nail goes in that Romantic coffin: a research review by widely respected MIT teacher Steven Pinker gives a summary of all of the major studies on premodern and modern violence, and the conclusion is unmistakable: the nature, extent, degree, and amount of violence in premodern times is staggeringly larger than in any modern times (including the two World Wars). In fact, as Pinker summarizes the evidence, “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion [2,000,000,0000] deaths, not 100 million”—that is, about 2000 times greater. In every form of violence known to humans, the modern Western world is, compared to the past, “the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.” Ken has been maintaining that for almost 3 decades, and he sees the greatest decline in violence (or increase in peace and peaceful ideals) as beginning particularly with the Western Enlightenment, an idea vehemently rejected by postmodernists of every flavor. What does the latest data show? “The decline in violence [during the modern period] is a fractal phenomenon,” meaning that this decline in violence with modernity is “visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogenous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.” In other words, the Western Enlightenment. Copyright © 2007 KenWilber.com. All Rights Reserved. 2 That article is appearing in March 19 The New Republic, bastion of Leftist thought, so it can’t be dismissed ideologically. And it still points out that “contra leftist apologists, who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts… suggest that pre-state [premodern] societies were far more violent than our own.” Another study, War before Civilization, showed that your chances of getting killed by homicide in the area now known as Illinois were 70 times higher in tribal times than modern times. Pinker: “At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man’s rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, these ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous…. But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.” So much for retro-Romanticism. But Ken always gave the Romantic notion its own due (something Pinker doesn’t do), and pointed out the ways that the Romantics were also right (e.g., there is indeed a Ground of Being, and we have become alienated from it, but not in some historical past, but in the involutionary currents prior to manifestation; and further, the Romantics are correct that bad things can indeed happen during development—repression is a reality—and we need to take repression and its cure seriously: but what is getting repressed is not God but id, and every single one of these recent studies supports exactly that. So the Integral model integrates the partial truths of both the growth-to-goodness and the recaptured-goodness views). Pinker asks the obvious two questions: what is this force of worldwide growth-to- goodness? And how did so many of intelligentsia get it so massively wrong? As for the Copyright © 2007 KenWilber.com. All Rights Reserved. 3 former, he gives four basic reasons that civilization is a progressive lessening of violence or increase in peace (based on Hobbes, Payne, Wright, and Singer). Ken said that while all of those are likely to contribute, the real and most fundamental reason is simple: Eros. Eros as it appears in all four quadrants of the human holon, and that especially means the drive to take more and more perspectives, because—and Pinker agrees with this part— the more perspectives that humans take, the more precious others’ lives become and therefore the less actual violence is committed. And it is this extraordinary Eros in the Logos of the Kosmos that Ken has devoted his life to elucidating and explaining, and we think it is fair to say that nobody has traced this Eros (with both its extraordinarily developmental ups and horridly repressive downs) better than Ken. In literally dozens of books, he has traced the historical and evolutionary contours of this “self-organization through self-transcendence.” Pinker says that throughout our overall history of progress, “We must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.” Might we suggest he read a few of Ken’s books? As part of this celebration, it is fantastic for all of us that as every year goes by, more and more evidence accumulates in favor of ideas that Ken first spotted and elucidated several decades ago. (Try Up from Eden as a starter….) As for how the leading intellectuals of the last 30 years could get so much of this wrong, Pinker also gives several plausible reasons. The evidence, after all, is and was very hard to miss. As only one example: “Social histories of the West provide evidence of numerous barbaric practices that became obsolete in the last five centuries, such as slavery, amputation, blinding, branding, flaying, disembowelment, burning at the stake, Copyright © 2007 KenWilber.com. All Rights Reserved. 4 breaking on the wheel, and so on. Meanwhile, for another kind of violence—homicide— the data are abundant and striking…. On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily….” How did the intelligentsia miss all that for the last 30 years? Pinker points especially to one item, simple proximity. “As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history.” And yet these proximate examples so upset us (inadvertent proof of the denied progress, because in premodern times, those were pastimes), that we can’t see beyond our own repulsion: that is, our modern sensibilities react to those, proof of what we are trying to deny. Another reason gets closer to the emotional heart of the matter: “Partly, it’s an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it’s the incentive structure of activism and opinion markets: No one has ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better and better.” Given the prevailing academic atmosphere, which penalized the truth, it took not just real brains but real heart to take the stand that Ken did. By sticking to the truth, he was often vilified, his books literally banned in some institutions and classes, papers written on how he lacked all emotions and no compassion at all, and entire PhD theses on how his horrid hierarchies were repressive—whereas that is a pretty good photographic negative of the truth. Part of the reason Ken was vilified is that he didn’t just point to the evidence, he pointed to the likely reasons that the evidence was being hidden, distorted, or denied Copyright © 2007 KenWilber.com. All Rights Reserved. 5 altogether. At the bottom of it was a classic pre/post fallacy giving rise to a genuine pathology or dysfunction. These intellectuals nobly wanted to find a genuine ground of Goodness (spiritual for the Romantics, secular for the Leftists), but in confusing pre-rational with post-rational, and then looking to premodern tribal consciousness as a role model for postmodern enlightened society, they opened themselves to every prepersonal impulse imaginable, starting with narcissism and nihilism, and boomeritis (pluralitis) was born.

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